Press Start: It's not the zombies that create tension and fear in Techland's latest game

After spending around six to eight hours with Techland’s latest zombie epic, Dying Light, I’ve realized the act of taking down zombies isn’t the most interesting part of the game – it’s the death defying leaps that stem from its free-running traversal system.

I came to this realization during my fourth attempt at climbing a communications tower. Do I jump to the left? What about to the right? Or maybe I need to drop down to the platform over there? Is that even a platform? Whatever I decide to do, I need to remember not to look down. The sense of visceral vertigo in Dying Light feels real, and is amplified by the game’s first-person perspective. The harrowing experience made me wonder what playing the game with an Oculus Rift VR headset would be like.

The hordes of undead below me were nothing more than a simple afterthought at this point – climbing this tower was my new enemy and I enjoyed this change of pace more than I expected.

That’s not to say Dying Light’s combat, focused on taking down rotting foes with various makeshift weapons, is bad, in fact, I think this is the game Poland-based development studio, Techland, wanted to create back when they released Dead Island in 2011.

It’s not like Dying Light’s combat system is bad, it’s just bounding across building is what makes the game feel “different.” [Techland]

I held my breathe and leaned forward on my couch in the real world as my character leaped towards a new part of the tower’s scaffolding. I miscalculated my jump and plummeted to the ground. I guess it’s time to try again.

Before I made it to this particular radio tower I was in the process of crafting a harrowing escape from a horde of hungry zombies, bounding across rooftops and doing whatever I could to not touch the ground, one of the many thing you should never do in Dying Light if you want to stay alive. This game isn’t about killing hordes of zombies, and instead is more about finding creative ways to avoid them.

Dead Island was full of impressive and ambitious concepts, but the game ultimately didn’t have the same level of polish as other big budget titles out at the time. Some people enjoyed Dead Island’s quirky glitches but I didn’t, especially after being the lucky recipient of the game’s dreaded saved file corruption issue. Dead Island was filled with silly glitches, many of them game-breaking, as well as strange graphical flaws, but when it comes to Dying Light, at least so far, my experience has been extremely smooth and is a huge step forward in terms of quality for Techland.

It’s almost as if Warner Bros. (Dying Light’s publisher) actually gave Techland extra time to polish the game – which they did – a concept it seems like Deep Silver (Dead Island’s publisher) wasn’t fond of. This is what likely lead to Techland parting ways from Deep Silver in the first place.

That machete is a good tool for taking down the undead. [Techland]

The game’s parkour system is also even significantly better than the somewhat confusing build of Dying Light I played at E3 this year. Back then I walked away impressed with the game’s day/night cycle, next-gen visuals and the ambition of its free-running system, but clamouring over objects, a gameplay element the Techland developer seated beside me at the time explained was an integral part of his studio’s vision for Dying Light, felt “off” in some way. I couldn’t always latch onto the objects I wanted to and it felt like I was constantly ramming my character’s head against walls unintentionally.

In a game like this fighting a cumbersome control system is never a good thing.

Thankfully, while Dying Light’s traversal system does take some getting used to, it’s superb, accurate and most importantly, fun, if you invest enough time into understanding its intricacies. The game’s levelling system also does a great job of throwing new abilities into the mix – like jumping across the heads of zombies – ensuring things remain feeling fresh and entertaining.

Techland has managed to make taking bounding leaps across rooftops feel just right. My first hour or so trying to get the hang of leaping between red and yellow stripped platforms was filled with obscenities (as seen through my recent two-hour live stream embedded below).

But with a little bit of effort and a dash of commitment, I was gliding across roof tops and swinging on poles with ease.

The parkour in Dying Light really is the key feature separating it from Dead Island and is likely the game’s biggest draw. Without the ability to climb on almost any surface, Dying Light is just a more polished, less glitchy version of a game that came out back in 2011, which might be what some people want, but not me. The game’s mission structure is repetitive and involves the same, “go here, retrieve that,” fetch quests that have been present in every Dead Island title, and the first 30 minutes of Dying Light certainly doesn’t do it any favours (this portion of Dying Light involves a cutscene that feels like it’s never going to end as well as a tedious tutorial system).

Free running is the feature that sets Dying Light apart from the slew of other nearly identical big budget, ultra-violent games on the market and is what makes the game fun.

Climb up a monstrous tower, look down, then try to find a way back to the surface, and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.